Gates-sponsored nonprofit brings climate solutions energy summit to smoky Seattle

The inaugural Breakthrough Energy Summit took place this week in Seattle. Scientists, innovators, and politicians dedicated to limiting the effects of climate change attended. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates started the nonprofit Breakthrough Energy in 2015, with a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Gates has said that might be the most difficult challenge humanity has ever taken on.

GeekWire’s Lisa Stiffler reports on companies and researchers who apply technology to environmental, energy, health, and other societal challenges. She covered the summit, which finished up yesterday. She shared highlights with KUOW’s Kevin Kniestedt.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kevin Kniestedt: Tell us about Breakthrough Energy. I noticed the company lists five “grand challenges” it wants to address: how we plug in, make things, grow things, get around, and keep cool and stay warm.

Lisa Stiffler: The Breakthrough Energy Initiative started in 2015 at the UN Climate Conference in Paris. This was an effort that Gates launched, initially focused on investing $1 billion that he pulled together from ultra-wealthy people like himself to back different climate tech companies. Since that time, it's really expanded. Now, it's an entire platform with a lot of different programs.

It includes entrepreneurs who are just starting to test their initial ideas, and companies that are much larger in size and are really scaling up and deploying their technologies. It also advocates for climate policy. This week was really a chance to bring together participants in all of the different programs under that Breakthrough Energy umbrella, to share their innovations, for investors to hear about the great work that's being done, and also to talk realistically about some of the challenges that are faced, and the policy that can help and potentially hurt any progress in this space.

Bill Gates said he was amazed by how far we've come since 2015. What amazed him?

He was really struck by the variety of innovation that has come out in the seven or so years since he started this effort. He's realizing that there are a lot of different solutions for all of those different sectors that you mentioned in the beginning that they're trying to tackle and to pull the carbon out of, and the pace is going really pretty quickly.

They've also raised an additional $1 billion to invest, so they're up to more than $2 billion. They've invested in 105 companies so far. And there are exciting things that are really rolling out already. I got to speak to the CEO of a company called ESS, an Oregon-based battery company. They're building these crazy-big batteries. They put them inside cargo shipping containers, and then they just plug them into the grid so that they're there to provide backup energy when, say, the sun isn't shining, or the wind isn't blowing. They just signed deals with utilities in Sacramento, California, and with Australia. So, action is happening. It's starting to take place, some of this transformation to something cleaner.

Did participants share Gates’ enthusiasm? I'm curious if they highlighted any challenges.

Whether it's global health or climate, Gates does tilt pretty optimistic. Other folks who were speaking at the summit kind of balanced that out a little bit. John Kerry, the U.S. Climate Envoy and former senator, gave a more balanced perspective. He feels like we can get to a zero-carbon economy, but he is really concerned that we're not going to get there fast enough to stop some of the worst impacts of climate change.

Larry Fink, the CEO of the investment firm BlackRock, was worried that while there's a lot of money going into climate, more than ever has before, that it's just not enough. He's also concerned about getting more capital from organizations like the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund, to help deploy these technologies to low- and middle-income countries.

And there was just a lot of acknowledgment from different participants about the current state of the world – the war in Ukraine, supply chain challenges, and economies teetering on recessions. The hope is that those are temporary situations that we’ll move past. And some did even look for some silver linings. They're hoping maybe the energy crisis that's been created by Putin will encourage a quicker transition in some places to clean energy as countries are realizing that they want to get off of their reliance on fossil fuels coming from places like Russia.

Bill Gates has been arguing for “green premiums” tracking. What is that and how would it work?

Gates introduced this idea of green premiums in the climate book that he put out last year. The idea is that we've got to move everything in our economy – energy, transportation, agriculture, the built environment, and manufacturing – to these carbon-free technologies. And right now, they're more expensive. That higher expense is the green premium. His hope is that by investing in this innovation we can shrink those green premiums so that these alternatives are cheaper, or at least on cost parity with the fossil fuel technologies.

He's suggesting maybe we should track our progress in addressing climate change by what's happening with green premiums. One example would be wind and solar power. They used to be crazy expensive, but now their prices have come down so far, so fast, that they're actually cheaper than coal. In that case, the green premium is less than zero. It's more affordable to use those technologies.

Did the fact that Seattle had some of the worst air quality numbers in the world this week come up during the summit?

Yes. It was pretty striking. This event was down on Pier 66, on the Seattle Waterfront. Just looking out the windows, the attendees would see all the smoke. You'd see the ferry come in and out of the smoke. You could even smell it yesterday when it was really intense.

It did come up as a point of discussion. In the closing plenary talk with Bill Gates, he noted that sometimes people confuse weather and climate, and they're not the same, but he acknowledged that it can help raise that awareness and that urgency. People realize that we need to take action and take it now because climate change is happening, and we're already feeling some of those harmful effects. So, it was acknowledged as something uncomfortable that might be a forcing factor to get people to move a little faster than they would otherwise.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.